I don't know. I was a small kid and just remember seeing the bullet pock marks my dad pointed out. I don't remember ever seeing any bombed-out buildings, although they might have existed. However, we did take a train to Berlin, probably in '62, and seeing East Berlin was startling to a kid. It was still devastated, looking very apocalyptic.

The Berlin wall had just been built when we visited, and I remember seeing curtains still fluttering through the hastily bricked up windows in the buildings that made up part of the wall. Someone (my dad?) also told us about the people who'd died trying to cross the wall. At the time, it seemed like ancient history to a kid, when it really had all happened only months before.

spud1910 said:

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I think the whole thing was more complex than we want to admit. We want to judge based on our experiences today, but that is not the life they lived. I have a friend that was visiting her grandmother in Belarus as a child. Regular German troups came through on their way to Russia and told the village to leave as the SS troops were coming and they would kill everyone, including women and children. My friend and her grandmother left and spent 4 years staying away from villages and living how they could. When they returned after the war, the Germans had driven a tank into their house, using it as camo. My dad as a 4 year old was going to the store to get bread as German POWs were returning from the fields near Orange, TX. One of them gave him the first stick of gum he ever had. Not all of them were Nazis. And some were good people. Many were not. My wife is from Russia and still has family there. They believe what Putin says. She has a couple of friends that are able to access outside news and they don't believe him, but many in Russia don't get to hear anything that Putin doesn't want them to hear. I suspect that many in Germany were the same way. And even if there were suspicions, do you risk your family by acting on those suspicions?

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